Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#231

Post by wtracy » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 7:30 PM UTC

eeniac wrote: post #229

loftyai wrote: post #64

I can't speak for every company out there, but for us, we've discovered that resumes and whiteboard challenges are bad predictors of great engineers. So, we simply come up with a small project that's related to what we would have you work on if you were hired and give you around a week to finish it. You can use other people's code snippets online as well as any libraries you see fit. As long as the end result is good…

Here's my take on it. Given I'm in a situation similar to OP's — took 4 weeks just to catch up with sleep and dismantle anxiety. I was approached about a job. The process includes a home assessment with a 5 day deadline. Definitely it's doable, it's a filter yadda yadda. But I'm asking you if the scene is really swarmed with impostors and bullshitters that you have to enforce people working for free for you to handpi…

> You wouldn't ask the cook to work for free just to taste his dish and then decline without paying him.

I'm under the impression that exactly this happens in the restaurant industry all the time.

Employers are abusive in all industries.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#232

Post by wtracy » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #76

loftyai wrote: post #64

I can't speak for every company out there, but for us, we've discovered that resumes and whiteboard challenges are bad predictors of great engineers. So, we simply come up with a small project that's related to what we would have you work on if you were hired and give you around a week to finish it. You can use other people's code snippets online as well as any libraries you see fit. As long as the end result is good…

So if you have a years worth of work todo, and 50 people apply, you get the work done for free?

There's a certain startup I won't name that has a reputation for outsourcing it's engineering proof-of-concepts this way.

You're certainly not going to get code you could actually put in production by doing that.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#233

Post by dragonwriter » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 7:43 PM UTC

eeniac wrote: post #229

loftyai wrote: post #64

I can't speak for every company out there, but for us, we've discovered that resumes and whiteboard challenges are bad predictors of great engineers. So, we simply come up with a small project that's related to what we would have you work on if you were hired and give you around a week to finish it. You can use other people's code snippets online as well as any libraries you see fit. As long as the end result is good…

Here's my take on it. Given I'm in a situation similar to OP's — took 4 weeks just to catch up with sleep and dismantle anxiety. I was approached about a job. The process includes a home assessment with a 5 day deadline. Definitely it's doable, it's a filter yadda yadda. But I'm asking you if the scene is really swarmed with impostors and bullshitters that you have to enforce people working for free for you to handpi…

> You wouldn't ask the cook to work for free just to taste his dish and then decline without paying him.

Yes, if you are hiring a cook for a restaurant (which, admittedly, most people don't do, because they don't run restaurants) or wedding or other event (which more people have experience with) you will, quite likely, do exactly that.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#234

Post by viraptor » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 8:24 PM UTC

iso1631 wrote: post #212

viraptor wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be the worst consulting experience for the company and I think you can easily tell a different between a test and outsourced work. Also that wouldn't likely save time. If the task will take someone 2h, I'd have to spend more than that: describing the task with all the relevant context, providing a mock of the environment it needs to be plugged into, reviewing the result, fixing any issues, changing it to m…

2 hours sure. A week not-so-much. OP wasn't clear how big the task was.

Even worse. A week long task without internal context or being able to chat with people who know it would be next to impossible to prepare. I've seen some projects which were thoroughly specced and handed over to a consulting agency. Half were not usable, the other half need heavy fixing. It was never a happy outcome.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#235

Post by sebdeharlez » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 8:50 PM UTC

I would just be very honest with what happened. My personal opinion is that every experience, and this includes job gaps for any reasons, can shape your personnality for the best. If the guy in front of you don't see what's positive in there, then, it migth be a sign that you should look somewhere else. This job gap probably had a huge positive influance on your life, since you now feel healthy, refreshed and passionate. I personaly had a burnout and had to stop working for a couple of months. When I came back to work, my employer tried to convince me to leave the company. But when he realized I wouldn't, he finally abendoned the idea. That year, I surpassed all my goals! Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#236

Post by PascLeRasc » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 9:24 PM UTC

scandox wrote: post #106

pcurve wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. I've reviewed thousands of resumes but I never paid much attention to gaps. Gap of 1 year wouldn't even register in my brain.

Oh gaps are usually pretty interesting. I once dug into a big gap (3 years) and went down quite a rabbit-hole with a candidate that was in every other respect excellent. But the gap: Let's just say it was the worst thing you can imagine.

He was installing Chrome over a modem connection.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#237

Post by LorenPechtel » Tue, Feb 04, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

darkwizard42 wrote: post #62

jobgaps wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think the vague `medical` needs further elaboration? I sure do know my medical is not related to mental health. Is it reasonable to somehow indicate that or it should be better left for an interviewer to inquire?

In the USA I am pretty sure it is actually illegal for a company to discriminate based on health issues, so a smart recruiter will NOT push this issue further than Medical. It would violate a few things and not be great if you sued and used that in court.

Legally, they can't, but the fact that you were out for months for an unspecified medical issue suggests you're likely to have more medical issues and thus would be a reason to be less likely to hire you.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#238

Post by DavidSJ » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:13 AM UTC

mlyle wrote: post #197

DavidSJ wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this answer misses the point, which is that this information is only a weak predictor of the problems you describe, thus must be discounted accordingly.

How do you discount "personal catastrophe" appropriately, though? Surely the volatility in outcomes is very important, and not some simple expected value. A 5% chance of my house burning down is much more costly to me than 5% of the economic cost of my house burning down. Indeed, there's not really a (reasonable) discounted price I will take for a chance of my house burning down. Of course, this kind of aggressive av…

You normally wouldn’t discount linearly. But that doesn’t mean you can’t put a price on it. There’s a limit to how much you’d pay for insurance, for example. Some risk is part of life.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#239

Post by eq_sd_ » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 12:52 AM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #176

Medical-triggered gap is joy a big deal. One thing I would worry about as a potential employer is if the candidate worked somewhere and is trying to hide that employer so that we can’t talk to them. But if you didn’t actually work, it’s not much of an issue in my book.

I never hid my previous employers but I really don't want companies reaching out to my previous job. My manager was toxic as hell and actually told me to give up when I tiptoed into telling him about some mental health issues that I was working through. He also told me everyone on my team disliked me. Eventually I did "give up" and stopped trying to impress anyone. I was also the only woman and felt extremely excluded by default. I ended up only being there for 6 months.

There isn't really a productive or healthy way to share this with a recruiter.

Re: Ask HN: How to explain job gaps on the resume?

#240

Post by JDiculous » Wed, Feb 05, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

I recently took 2 years off, and it took a grand total of 2 weeks to interview at the company that I ended up getting an offer at and working for. I just told interviewers honestly that I had taken a sabbatical to fulfill one of my life goals of traveling the world. It didn't work against me as much as I'd expected it to. Of course I still had to pass the technical interview, which ultimately companies care most about anyways.

Most companies care primarily about your technical competence and don't really care about that other stuff. This "job gap" scare is vastly overrated (perhaps large corporations might be more anal about job gaps if they're just looking for obedient corporate drones, but there's plenty of work outside those kinds of companies).

But if you're really worried about the job gap thing, you could say that you were playing around with new technologies, working on your own side projects / startup, or freelancing. But if you have other experience, I don't think most employers really care so long as you're competent.